I quickened my pace. Naturally I was eager finally to meet the aliens, for I believed they would explain everything to me. The snake bites its own tail.
My excitement was such that it took me a moment to comprehend that there was something wrong with the floating signifier, the two holographic letters hovering over the roof of the dacha. I looked again, and saw that the S was twisted about. Something was wrong with it. It was proclaiming not SF, not exactly. I looked again.
It was no Z; the S was the wrong way about. This was a puzzle. Of course, I was looking at Cyrillic, not Latin, characters: which is to say, the ‘S’ was a C and it was the C that was mirror-written. The F (which is to say, the Φ) was not inverted. It was the correct way about. Why would one letter be reversed and the other not? My brain buzzed, and lurched. Then it occurred to me that one property of the character Φ is its mirror-symmetry, such that it looks the same from front as from back. From here, but slowly, as the most obvious things sometimes do occur, I reasoned that I was looking not at SF, but at FS from behind.
So I was coming up towards the back of the dacha — and indeed I was, because I recognised the slope, and the broad windows of the back room in which we had sat and talked decades before. Yet this was a puzzlement, because I could not understand what FS abbreviated. But I was at the house now, very conscious of the fact that I had believed myself to be approaching from the front. This unnerved me. Nobody wants to sneak up the back route when they can march proudly up the front. I hurried along the side of the building, a huge beige rectangle with two blank windows like eyeholes in a robot skull, and I kept glancing upwards as I jogged so as not to lose sight of the gleaming letters. It was clearer now. The building was labelled not SF but the reverse:
And then, with a second sense of foolishness at being so slow to realise, I saw that there were more than two letters. There were two strings of letters. Not individual signifiers, but strands like DNA encoding a more profound mystery. It was that I had not seen the other letters until I came round the front. But now I could see that the F was the end of one word, and the S the beginning of another. I was a little breathless now, and panting, an intimation that I had translated some of my earthly limitations into this new mode of existence — my shortness of breath, for example — and I stopped, gazing upwards, to get a good view of the legend. It was written in bold and unmistakable letters. I could not understand how I had not seen it fully before: shining script, each letter a metre high:
And from looking up I looked down, and he was there, standing on the porch. He was beaming at me. He was the most distinctive-looking human being I think I have ever laid eyes upon. Of course he was here, in this place. ‘Josef Stalin,’ I gasped, hurrying forward. ‘Josef Stalin.’
‘Comrade Skvorecky,’ he boomed. ‘Come up here! Come up to the porch! Let us talk!’
I was in my twenties again, and as nervy and callow as ever I had been in that decade. ‘To find you here, comrade!’ I kept babbling. ‘To find you here!’
‘You are surprised?’
But, as he asked that question, I realised I was not surprised. Surprise did not describe my state of mind. I apprehended inevitability as, itself, an emotion. Of course I would meet Stalin. Had I ever believed that Death had red hair? Death was not a red-haired man. Here I was.
He led me through the main door. The hallway inside was exactly as I remembered it. We went through to the back room: there were the broad windows, and their view over the rain-washed green of Russian hills.
‘I am not surprised, comrade,’ I said, bravely. ‘I take it I am not alive any more?’
‘Consider,’ said Stalin, settling himself into a chair. I looked around: we two were in the familiar old room of the dacha. There was the same photo on the wall, although this time Stalin was surrounded not by Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin but by Rapoport, Kaganovich, Asterinov and myself. I was there in the photograph, scowling my twenty-eight-year-old scowl, and all the others were grinning. I thought: At least I am alive with my scowl. Much good their grins will do them now they’re all of them dead. But then I realised I was dead too, scowl and all. Everything had changed.
Stalin sat there, looking up at me.
‘Consider,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and puffing it contentedly. ‘You were inside the main reactor room of a nuclear reactor. You stood in that place at the precise moment it exploded. Do you think you could survive such a blast?’
‘No.’
‘Ah! But it was no ordinary blast! It is one thing to be blown up by high explosive, and quite another to be blown up by radiation. As the citizens of Hiroshima discovered! Radiation!’ He beamed, and the strands of his moustache spread minutely. I fancied I could almost hear them rustling.
There were seats on the far side of the room. I picked my way over the bare boards of the floor and sat down. But I had no cigarettes. I was aware that I had smoked my last cigarette. I had stood inside the reactor building and smoked my last ever cigarette. That was all over, now.
‘Radiation?’ I said.
‘Radiation,’ he confirmed.
‘Let me put it this way,’ I offered, trying to master my sense of over-awe. ‘For a long time I disbelieved the existence of alien beings, these creatures — you — from another star. I accepted that other people did believe. I simply did not share their belief. But is it the case that… I am now meeting the aliens?’
Stalin’s face was capable of great sternness, but also of great benevolence. Such a warm and wide smile!
‘Might it be,’ I said, ‘that I am not encountering you as you really are? Perhaps you are assuming a human shape, to facilitate interaction between us? You have been into my mind and pulled out this memory.’ I cast my arms around. ‘This memory of me being in this dacha. Of me meeting the original Stalin. Using that memory you have built this imagined space, in which you and I can talk. But you are not truly Stalin.’
‘I am truly Stalin,’ he said, his smile broadening further.
‘But as a radiation alien,’ I suggested, ‘surely you do not naturally possess corporeal form? Surely not.’
‘And what do you know about the radiation aliens?’ Stalin asked me.
‘I thought I knew,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d written you. I thought I had created you.’
‘A common human mistake. You think yourselves Frankensteins, to have made monsters. But the monsters were always there. It was never needful for you to create them.’
‘I did not think I had done it alone,’ I said, nodding at the photograph.
‘You could not have done it alone.’
‘So it’s not that we wrote you — is it that you somehow shaped us?’
Stalin puffed his cigarette. Light from the uncurtained windows made beauty in the unfolding curves and curls, shells and eels of smoke.
‘Consider,’ he said again. ‘What is radiation? It is light. Does light not hurt us? Have you never been sunburnt, comrade?’
‘Sunburn,’ I repeated.
‘Many people believe that aliens lurk in the shadows, hide away. That they only emerge at night, like vampires.’ He chuckled. ‘No! No! Aliens come from the stars, not from the darkness between the stars. We come precisely out of the light. It is simply our brilliance that is harmful to you. That’s all. And who has been more harmful than I?’